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Our future, our universe, and other weighty topics

Saturday, June 21, 2014

The Ethics of Cryonic Preservation

In
his book Singularity Rising, James. D. Miller ends with a
ringing endorsement of cryonic preservation, the freezing of the
human body in hopes that medical science will one day be able to
revive that body. There are already companies such as Alcor that
will do such cryonic preservation. This reminds me of my favorite
cryonics joke, referring to a brand name of frozen treats:

Man:
Did you hear that the son of Ted Williams had his father's head
cryonically preserved?

Woman:
Really? So what do you call that, when you have your Dad's head
frozen?

Man:
You call it a Popsicle.

Cryonics
may be the subject of jokes, but Miller is dead serious about it. He
says that his thinking has evolved to the point where he now believes
“underuse of cryonics is the greatest evil of our time.” Miller's
reasoning is along the lines that if we have some means of freezing
people, and we fail to use such means, it is almost like murder.
Miller asks:

How
will the future judge us if cryonics works and future historians come
to believe that we should have known that it would work? Will our
descendants think us monsters for letting so many die unnecessarily?

Let
us look for a minute at the ethics of cryonic preservation. Imagine
you are about to die, and you have $150,000 in your bank account. Is
it moral for you to use that money to have your body cryonically
preserved? I doubt that it would be a good moral choice.

There
are two reasons why it seems that it would not be moral to do such a
thing. The first reason has to do with energy use and carbon
footprints. According to the web site of the cryonic preservation
company Alcor, “Alcor patients are stored under
liquid nitrogen at a temperature of -196°C.” (Talk about a
euphemism, using the term “patient” rather than the word
“corpse.”)

Preserving a body at such a
super-low temperature uses up a huge amount of energy every year. The
problem is that in today's world, energy use usually requires fossil
fuels to be burnt by things such as coal plants. The more fossil
fuels that are burnt, the more quickly we heat the planet, and the
more we put the environment at risk, making many species extinct,
putting many humans (and perhaps even the survival of our species) at
risk. Can we imagine how much worse global warming would get if we
burned up a lot more coal so that every dead person could be
cryonically preserved?

The second reason why it
would apparently not be moral to have yourself cryonically preserved
is that you could use the same funds in an alternate way, and save quite a few lives. You could donate that $150,000 to some charity which fights hunger around the world, or pays for vaccinations. A donation of
about $150,000 would save multiple lives, given that there are poor
countries where people subsist on only a few hundred dollars a year.
By using the money to cryonically preserve yourself rather than
donating to a life-saving charity, you are spending the money on a
project that merely has a small chance of saving one life rather than
making a contribution that will probably save several or many lives.
That's not morally sound.

This argument is based on the
claim that there would be only a very low chance of you being revived
from cryonic preservation, but is that assumption correct? Let's look
at the odds. In order for you to be successfully revived after you
were frozen, each of the following eight conditions would have to be
met:

Condition 1: You would
have to be successfully frozen soon after death. It
would not do for you to die 1000 miles
from your cryonic preservation company. In such a case, your brain
would undergo too much damage before they put you under the deep
freeze. You would have to die relatively near your cryonic preservation company,
and your body would have to be quickly transported to them.

Condition 2: You would
have to be successfully frozen in the right way. Your
cryonic preservation company would have to take great care to
preserve your body in the right way. This would be a dicey
proposition, because they might be freezing people for 50 years or
100 years before anyone got around to reviving a body; so no one
would know exactly what was the right way to preserve the body (for
example, no one would know whether it was some particular chemical
that should be injected into the brain, or some other chemical).
Also, the staff working for your cryonic preservation company would
have to work very carefully, which might be unlikely (since some of
them might be thinking to themselves: who cares, the guy's
dead).

Condition 3: Your cryonic
preservation company would have to stay in business until science
advanced far enough to allow resuscitation of frozen bodies. This
might be unlikely, because it might take many decades until such a
time. During such a time there might be all kinds of social and
economic upheavals that might lead to the collapse of your cryonic
preservation company, plus the possibilities of nuclear war or the
banning of cryonics by some conservative administration.

Condition 4: The funds you
had supplied to the company would have to last until science advanced
far enough to allow resuscitation of frozen bodies. Given
inflation and escalating energy costs, that might be very unlikely. Once your account balance fell to zero,
your cryonics company would probably incinerate or bury your body. Condition 5: Consciousness
and memory would have to be based purely on physical brain states,
and not on delicate energy states that would be lost during freezing.
Your memory and consciousness
might depend purely on physical arrangements of neurons, or it might
also depend on very delicate electrical and quantum state conditions
in your brain. If the latter case is true, your memory and
personality is likely to get completely wiped out by decades of
low-temperature cryonic preservation.

Condition 6: There would
have to be no soul that survives death.
Based on things such as near-death experiences, apparition sightings,
and children who report reincarnation memories, many people believe
there is something like a soul that survives death. If that is true,
it will not work to try to revive a frozen body. If, for example,
your soul has gone on to some heavenly realm, then it will not
reappear in your body when someone tries to unfreeze it.

Condition 7: Science would
have to figure out a way to resuscitate frozen bodies. This
part is very unlikely. We have no promising approach here, other than
warming a body up, zapping it with electricity and hoping for the
best.

Condition 8: When they
revived your body, the resulting personality would have to be you,
rather than a new person. An
additional uncertainty is that when they revived your body, you might
find that your memory was entirely wiped out. So the resulting
personality might not really be you, but some new “blank slate”
mind that might really be a whole new person.

The
probability of all of these conditions occurring would be very low.
This is why from a moral standpoint it is far better for you to have
your will leave your money to charity than for you to make an
arrangement with a cryonic preservation company. Much better to save
lives for certain with a charitable donation than to start down some
chilly high-tech road that will very probably not save even one life.

Copyright Notice

All posts on this blog are authored by Mark Mahin, and are protected by copyright. Copyright 2013-2014 by Mark Mahin. All rights reserved. Any resemblance between any fictional character and any real person is purely coincidental.